This is a more personal podcast in which I try to reckon the romance of the solitary man — focusing on Kierkegaard's reading of Abraham and Issac in "Fear and Trembling" — with the very real tugs the human social — affection, grief, kindness.

This is the second part of a series in which I read the title of my new book, Reading the Way of Things. In this episode, I focus on how the phrase "The Way" functions.

A way is an action, a trajectory, a mode of going. It is limited and yet emergent and infinite.

I discuss Hagakure: The Way of the Samurai; the relationship between the infinite and the limit with reference to the calculus; the reality TV cooking show, Chopped; Epictetus, the great stoic; Deleuze's notion of the one as many. And more!

I discuss why use the word "reading" in the title of my book (Reading the Way of Things). I reference the implications for writing and teaching writing; Deleuze's readings of things; the pleasure and power of reading as distinct from what we consider literacy.

As far as I can tell, everything is multiple — which shifts the demands of life. For if everything is in fact multiple, how do we articulate it? How do we seek it? Amplify it? The will to multiplicity is different than the will to the definitive; this will can be found in irony, in humor, in Monty Python, Louis CK, Clarice Lispector, Derrida, Deleuze & Guattari.

Before we're even born, we are taught how to process the world. After all, we are prefigured in the womb as a baby soon to arrive as a child, as male or female, as having a name and parents. Which is to say, we come to this world already enmeshed in elaborate cultural institutions, discourses, and ways of operating. There is no such thing as a clean slate, no immaculate birth. We are born somewhere, as something, a cog within a m

This mode of processing is institutionalized in school as well as in the media. But this mode is not neutral or natural. It entails a a certain architecture of relations between people, concepts, and knowledge.

Mentioned here: Geometry, Foucault, Bergson, viewing art, being creative, new ways of making sense, and more!

Some thoughts on the plenum and how the space between things is full, filled to the brim with forces that are social, local, global, cosmic all at once. With reference to Merleau-Ponty and online dating.